Metroid Prime 4: Beyond Review – Worth The Wait

Metroid Prime 4: Beyond Review

I love Metroid games a lot. They’re intricate puzzle boxes on a massive scale, full of interlocking pieces moving in perfect sync. By the time you get to the end of one, you’ve memorized the map. Every nook and cranny has been explored and wrung out. Metroid Prime 4: Beyond tries something a little different. It turns out, adding an open-world element to these games threatens that delicate balance. I loved this game, but I grew to hate riding across that desert with a slow-burning passion. You’re just killing time between levels, and for what? But the stages themselves were awesome.

In fact, this is mostly a triumphant return for the Metroid Prime series. The visuals are slick, the music is excellent, and the controls are air-tight. You’ve got new powers to mess with, and a whole new world to explore. And it’s such a beautiful world. Your first stop is a giant tower in the middle of the desert. Every piece of it feels impossibly alien, advanced, and elegant. There’s a focus on psychic power that feels like a natural evolution. Where else can you go once conventional tech has reached its peak? In particular, there’s a floating structure on the roof, a teleporter, that silenced me with its sense of scale. It’s so enormous, and yet so isolated and stark, that I just… stared at it for a little while. This whole world’s design is excellent, is what I’m saying.

A Vast Alien World

Which makes the open-world sections feel all the more baffling. You spend a lot of time backtracking in a Metroid game, and Beyond is no exception. The problem is, now that backtracking includes a massive, mostly empty desert. Yes, there are points of interest scattered across the map, but the main quest is tied up in the stages that line the desert’s borders. At one point, I was methodically checking every completed stage, looking for the bit that I’d missed. This is already a lot of work, but those repeated rides across the sand made it excruciating. You get a bike (eventually), which makes it a bit faster, but still! The open-world aspect of the game doesn’t feel earned. Instead, it’s a lot of padding in a level structure that can’t afford it.

While the visuals in Beyond are terrific, it’s more of an incremental evolution than I was expecting. But it makes sense. Like the Mario series, Nintendo figured out what the Prime games should look like decades ago. With the formula long since perfected, every new game makes only iterative upgrades. So I wasn’t blown away by the new visuals. Instead, the established Metroid look has been tweaked and tuned to perfection. Beyond looks like you expect it to, but there’s a lot of room within that framework for fine details. Samus’ armour looks incredible, for example. And her new ride is equally gorgeous. But the environments and the enemies feel familiar somehow.

Open World For Some Reason

The music has evolved in a similar way. I recognize all the sound effects, and certain musical cues are pulled directly from the first Prime game. But there’s a lot of new tracks. Like the graphics, the soundtrack has been slowly getting better for years. Now, in the fourth entry, you can hear the fruits of that patient labour in every song. Fury Green, the first major area, has some remarkable background music. It evokes exploration, mystery, and grand splendour. Plus, you can hear that evolution of sound running all the way to the first entry in the Prime series.

I’m not a huge fan of the mouse controls. They work beautifully, but it’s tough to find a comfortable position for long sessions. You really need a flat surface at office desk height. But if you can sort out the ergonomics, it’s a brilliant system. Your mouse hand controls the camera until you lock onto a target, then it only moves your gun arm. And really, you need to be using the mouse controls. Every boss fight is clearly designed with them in mind. You can win most fights without using them, but you can tell they’d make a difference.

Excellent Mouse Controls

Boss fights are less about raw skill and more about puzzle-solving, thanks to those same mouse controls. You’ve got to keep your head on a swivel, but the challenge is more about how to damage them at all. Once you solve that mystery, it all comes down to patience and persistence. Fights in general depend on you being smart and prepared. Samus can’t take a ton of damage at first, so you need to learn the ins and outs of every enemy. Alternately, if the going gets too tough, you can adjust the difficulty. I am absolutely not above such behaviour, although it took an especially intense battle to wear me down.

Once you strip away the needless open-world padding, there’s an excellent game underneath. The world is engrossing and beautiful, the boss fights are clever, and the new controls are seamlessly integrated into the rest of the game. There are some breathtaking sights to see, and Samus is sporting some awesome new armour. All the superior design choices make the baffling ones stand out even more, however. I can’t comprehend why this game was made open-world. The backtracking you have to do is downright offensive. Otherwise, this is a fantastic entry in the Metroid Prime series.

***A Nintendo Switch 2 code was provided by the publisher***